Schools for a Civil Society

As the conflict drags on between B.C. teachers and the government, it's brought out other conflicts: the competition for funds between the public and independent schools, and the political conflict between two visions of society.

Some public school supporters call for moving the subsidy to independent schools back to the public system. And it's a logical position. Historically, taxpayers paid only for the public schools. Socred patriarch W.A.C. Bennett was adamant that if parents didn't like the public system, they could pay the whole shot for schools more to their liking.

It was Bennett's son Bill who created the subsidies that made the private schools "independent." It was seen then as a straight political bribe, but it's now as entrenched as the Agricultural Land Reserve (probably more).

Our two-tier school system also reflects B.C.'s conflicted attitude toward education. Until we change that attitude, little else will change.

As a thought experiment, though, let's consider pulling public support from the independent schools and letting those schools fend for themselves again.

According to the Federation of Independent School Associations, about 74,000 kids are in the independent system now, compared to 514,000 in the public schools. Some families would sacrifice to keep their kids in independent schools, but it would be financially impossible for many. Without the $245 million that helps support them (at the average rate of $3,310 per student), some independent schools would simply have to close or merge.

In theory, the public-school population would simply grow back toward its late-1990s level, which peaked in 1997-98 at 615,000. In practice, many school districts would have nowhere to put a sudden increase in students; many school facilities have been closed, sold or repurposed. So an influx of students might look like a return to the 1950s, when the first baby boomers went to school in shifts.

And what about the teachers in the independent schools? Many, but not all, are qualified to teach in the public system. Would they migrate into the B.C. Teachers' Federation, and would they bring their seniority with them? Neither they nor the BCTF would welcome such a merger except on carefully negotiated terms. Nor would school boards enjoy suddenly having to meet much bigger teacher payrolls.

Awkward demands on schools

Many independent schools have a strong religious foundation, whether Evangelical, Catholic, Jewish, Sikh or Muslim. Some of those schools would survive, but others would not; their pupils would have to enter the public system. Religious students certainly thrive in the public schools, but the new kids by definition would be from families that don't like or trust those schools. They might well make awkward demands: time for prayers in a reserved space, or refusal to be vaccinated, or dietary requirements that would be hard to satisfy.

Even the emigres from secular independent schools could be a problem. Their parents would themselves tend to be well educated and concerned about standards. They could well put pressure on local principals, parent advisory councils, and school boards for more and better programs -- even if Victoria refused to spend another dime on education.

Back in the 1990s, our school-bashers pointed to Japanese schools as better than ours. But they never sent their own kids to those great schools. Meanwhile, Japanese and other Asian parents have been sending their kids to our schools, and paying high prices for the privilege -- to the point where our underfunded schools now rely on those kids.

Asia and the rest of the world are trying to tell us something: Our timber and liquid natural gas are interesting if we want to give them away, but our teachers are worth almost any price we care to name.

Create a pro-Canada alumni network

Education is a very low-emissions export. Kids fly in, you fill their heads with words and numbers and ideas, and they fly out again. No ravaged watersheds, no oil spills, no poisoned salmon streams. What's more, if you do your job right you create lifetime customers. They will come back not only as tourists but as purchasers of any other goods and services we may want to offer.

Even the most advanced economies rely on personal connections -- what the Chinese call guanxi, relationships through which you can do real business with people you trust. So we've already created the beginning of a worldwide network of pro-Canada alumni. We need to develop that network and expand it exponentially, if only to compete with American and other networks. The way to build such a network is to make our education system even more attractive to foreigners.

We wouldn't be pioneers. Finland (with about the same population as B.C.) has simultaneously enjoyed a world reputation as an education superpower while its current high-tech economy has run into trouble. The Finns can't go back to selling raw logs and paper. So they're aggressively exporting their education.

A Finnish international school is up and running in Qatar. Finland's education minister recently signed a deal with Saudi Arabia to deliver technical and vocational education to young Saudis. Finnish teaching materials have turned Italian elementary students into eager, top-ranking math whizzes.

What's maddening about their success is that we send our educators to Helsinki to learn the Finns' secrets, only to find the Finns acquired those secrets in Alberta and B.C. They take our teaching expertise more seriously than we ourselves do.

The title is misleading: they're not the smartest kids, just the best educated. And it's how they got that way that should interest North American teachers, parents and students.

Amanda Ripley is a very good guide. An investigative journalist, she knows how to write. Somehow she got the time and resources to do expensive and time-consuming research for this book, which took her from the U.S. to Finland, Poland and South Korea. But it wasn't just education tourism; she really dug into the school systems she studied, so her findings have some credibility as research.

Americans, and to a lesser extent Canadians, love to beat themselves up about their education failings as compared to the Finns or Koreans or whatever country is currently thriving economically. (Remember the 1990s, when Japan was supposed to be shaming us?)

It's a dubious policy to continue the beatings until scores improve, especially since we also love to rationalize about the "otherness" of the foreign: those ice-eyed Finns with their phonetic alphabet, those Asian kids driven to top grades or suicide -- nothing like our own kids. It might be more persuasive if I didn't remember the same BS being peddled in the 1950s about how super-educated young Soviets would roll over the grinning American ignoramuses of my generation.

Ripley disarms that argument by using three young Americans as her surrogates, experiencing different systems from the inside. An Oklahoman named Kim raises enough money to spend a year as an exchange student in Finland, Eric goes from Minnesota to South Korea, and Tom from Gettysburg High to Poland. Ripley then tracks their progress while also interviewing other students and educators in the host countries.

In the process, she also explains the culture and philosophy behind each country's school system -- and how such wildly different systems can still produce such remarkable results.

When the Times declared 2012 the “Year of the MOOC,” it seemed, in the words of the paper, that “everyone wants in,” with schools, students, and investors eager to participate. But, as can happen in academia, early ambition faded when the first few assessments were returned, and, since then the open-online model appears to have earned an incomplete, at best. An average of only four per cent of registered users finished their MOOCs in a recent University of Pennsylvania study, and half of those enrolled did not view even a single lecture.

EdX, a MOOC collaboration between Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has shown results that are a little more encouraging, but not much. And a celebrated partnership between San Jose State and Udacity, the company co-founded by Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford professor turned MOOC magnate , also failed, when students in the online pilot courses consistently fared worse than their counterparts in the equivalent courses on campus.

Some of the problems encountered by MOOCs echo those of an earlier model of alternative learning. Last month, the General Educational Development exam, or G.E.D., was replaced by a more challenging computer version. Like MOOCs, the G.E.D, which has been around since 1942, is partially an attempt to save time and money in education, and to extend opportunity to students outside the traditional classroom. As a marker of high-school equivalence, it holds the promise that an entire academic career can be distilled into the knowledge required to pass a five-part exam.

But according to a September, 2013, American RadioWorks report, of the forty per cent of G.E.D.-holders who go on to college, fewer than half complete more than a year, and only about four per cent earn a four-year degree. The additional rigor of the redesigned exam might not be the solution. The military tried a similar approach when, in the nineteen-seventies, it raised the G.E.D. scores required for entry. Even then, G.E.D. applicants quit or were thrown out of the service at a higher rate than enlistees with high-school degrees.

This brings back memories of the 1990s, when I designed and taught my college's first online writing course. We had a great communication system in First Class, and some eager, technically skilled students.

But the course ended with a third of the students doing fine, a third doing rather poorly, and a third vanishing altogether.

When I mentioned this on a bulletin board for online teachers, the response was striking: "Thank God I'm not the only one!" It was happening everywhere.

Eventually it sank in: We teachers were gung-ho early adopters who imagined our students must be gung-ho too. But they weren't.

The top third didn't give a damn about the thrill of being online. It was just where the information was that they needed to get where they wanted to go. The middle third (some of whom I'd taught face to face) were clearly not engaged as they been in a classroom. And the bottom third didn't get anything out of the experience at all.

That was when I finally (after almost 30 years in the business) realized that education does not depend on brilliant pedagogy or flashy PowerPoint slides. It depends on a rewarding social experience, for teacher and students alike.

Compared to the firehose information flow in a classroom, a course delivered online offered less than a trickle. We called the online medium "interactive," but it was like swapping small talk with someone on Pluto: the delay between signal and response was too long and fuzzy to be worthwhile.

After a few more years of tweaking, my online courses were no more successful. The chief value of the internet, in my last few years before retiring, was in creating class blogs where I could post my lecture notes and handouts. The students thought that was kind of cool, but they rarely bothered to post anything themselves.

So now, after God know how many millions have been spent, MOOCs aren't doing any better than we pioneers did when we jumped into online education without a clue.

Millions of laid-off American factory workers were the first to realize that they were competing against job seekers around the globe with comparable skills but far smaller paychecks. But a similar fate also awaits workers who aspire to high-skilled, high-paying jobs in engineering and technical fields unless this country learns to prepare them to compete for the challenging work that the new global economy requires.

The American work force has some of weakest mathematical and problem-solving skills in the developed world. In a recent survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a global policy organization, adults in the United States scored far below average and better than only two of 12 other developed comparison countries, Italy and Spain. Worse still, the United States is losing ground in worker training to countries in Europe and Asia whose schools are not just superior to ours but getting steadily better.

The lessons from those high-performing countries can no longer be ignored by the United States if it hopes to remain competitive.

Finland: Teacher Training

Though it dropped several rankings in last year’s tests, Finland has for years been in the highest global ranks in literacy and mathematical skills. The reason dates to the postwar period, when Finns first began to consider creating comprehensive schools that would provide a quality, high-level education for poor and wealthy alike. These schools stand out in several ways, providing daily hot meals; health and dental services; psychological counseling; and an array of services for families and children in need. None of the services are means tested.

Moreover, all high school students must take one of the most rigorous required curriculums in the world, including physics, chemistry, biology, philosophy, music and at least two foreign languages.

But the most important effort has been in the training of teachers, where the country leads most of the world, including the United States, thanks to a national decision made in 1979. The country decided to move preparation out of teachers’ colleges and into the universities, where it became more rigorous.

By professionalizing the teacher corps and raising its value in society, the Finns have made teaching the country’s most popular occupation for the young. These programs recruit from the top quarter of the graduating high school class, demonstrating that such training has a prestige lacking in the United States. In 2010, for example, 6,600 applicants competed for 660 available primary school preparation slots in the eight Finnish universities that educate teachers.

The teacher training system in this country is abysmal by comparison. A recent report by the National Council on Teacher Quality called teacher preparation programs “an industry of mediocrity,” rating only 10 percent of more than 1,200 of them as high quality. Most have low or no academic standards for entry. Admission requirements for teaching programs at the State University of New York were raised in September, but only a handful of other states have taken similar steps.

Finnish teachers are not drawn to the profession by money; they earn only slightly more than the national average salary. But their salaries go up by about a third in the first 15 years, several percentage points higher than those of their American counterparts. Finland also requires stronger academic credentials for its junior high and high school teachers and rewards them with higher salaries.

When PISA results were first presented 12 years ago, the participating countries were excited to see how their school systems perform compared to one another. Now the launch of the fifth PISA results is accompanied by more criticism than before due to the issues with cross-country comparisons and the dominant role that PISA plays in determining priorities for national education policies. Whatever its limitations are, the data from more than half a million 15-year-olds around the world is now here, and we should try to make the best out of them.

An appropriate use of PISA data is not to create global league tables that praise or shame countries for their performances in standardized mathematics, reading literacy and science tests. But this is still the most common way to report PISA results.

In Finland, media bluntly concluded that Finnish school system has collapsed pointing to country's drop from 6th best in the world in mathematics in 2009 to 12th three years later. Swedish newsagents went even further stating that Sweden's all-time-low PISA scores are a "national disaster" that puts the future of the nation at risk. It was a similar story of concern in Canada.

In the US, authorities were concerned about widening learning gap between American and Asian youth and how it is harmful to America's economic competitiveness. Many others seem to draw their conclusions of PISA by a glance at the league tables.

Another handicap of using PISA to inform national policies is to admire the highest scoring school systems and thereby fail to see the common patterns from the data. PISA consumers should note that not every high-scoring school system is successful.

A school system is "successful" if it performs above the OECD average in mathematics, reading literacy and science, and if students' socio-economic status has a weaker-than-average impact on students' learning outcomes. The most successful education systems in the OECD are Korea, Japan, Finland, Canada and Estonia.

My personal takeaway from the PISA 2012 study is how it proves that fashionable Global Educational Reform Movement (GERM) is built on wrong premises. GERM, that emerged from England's Education Reform Act 1988 and was further accelerated by the No Child Left Behind and the Race to the Top reforms in the US, assumes that market mechanisms are the best vehicles for whole system improvements.

GERM has acted like a virus that "infects" education systems as it travels around the world. The infection can be diagnosed by checking the state of the following five symptoms.

First is increased competition between schools that is boosted by school choice and related league tables offering parents information that helps them make the right "consumer" decisions.

Second is standardization of teaching and learning that sets detailed prescriptions how to teach and what students must achieve so that schools' performance can be compared to one another.

Third is systematic collection of information on schools' performance by employing standardized tests. These data are then used to hold teachers accountable for students' achievement.

Fourth is devaluing teacher professionalism and making teaching accessible to anyone through fast-track teacher preparation.

Fifth is privatizing public schools by turning them to privately governed schools through charter schools, free schools and virtual schools.

Whether it be business, education or life in general, it often makes sense to figure out what you want to do and what you do not want to do. It’s also a good idea to figure out how you are going to assess your success.

This is good, but I would like to add one more step.

I think it’s also important to decide how you will not assess what you’ve done.

I think Maya Angelou provided us with a wonderful example of this when she said:

Life is not measured by the number of breaths you take but by the moments that take your breath away.

In one sentence, Angelou helps us to see what we should be doing (living), while simultaneously showing us how we should and should not measure the quality of our lives.

For the last decade, Finland has been the model nation for education systems around the world. Finland should be applauded for resisting the urge to invest in the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) and instead pursuing alternative policies. Perhaps most notably, standardized tests are almost completely absent from Finnish schools.

And yet, world attention has been focused on Finland mostly because of their high scores on PISA’s standardized tests.

See the contradiction?

PISA’s 2012 rankings show Finland has been replaced at the top with a handful of Asian countries (and a city). By idolizing the rankings, people might drop Finland like a hot-potato to chase after Asian countries who achieve their high scores with very different priorities and questionable means.

Recognizing people or nations for doing the right thing for the wrong reasons can be misleading and ultimately unsustainable. PISA’s rankings on their own are useless. The real lessons from PISA are found from researching how each nation achieved their results and then assessing their methods via ethical criteria that is independent of their results. (Things go very wrong when we allow education policy to be driven by circular logic: define effective nations as those who raise test scores, then use test score gains to determine effective nations.)

We need to recognize Finland for doing the right things with their schools for the right reasons, but that means we need to move beyond reducing learning to standardized test scores and PISA rankings. Until then, we run the risk of chasing high performing nations that score well and rank high with methods that are less than enviable.

Assessing the quality of education by how many questions we answer correctly is kind of like judging a life by the number of breaths we take — both are clear, simple and wrong.

PISA offers at least an appearance of objectivity and therefore of accuracy in assessing student performance. However different the cultural conditions between the laid-back Finnish system and the relentless grind of the Asian cram schools, the scores looked unbiased by teachers, politicians, or educational ideology: can the kid solve the problem?

PISA therefore carries a lot of political clout, which means teachers, politicians, and educational ideology must either support the tests or find some way to deal with unwelcome results. Finland has done both.

When the first PISA scores were released in 2000, everyone was amazed that Finland had beaten just about everyone. The Finns were amazed too. For 30 years they'd been redesigning their school system, not to get high test scores but to give every kid an equal chance at a good education. Having succeeded at achieving equality, they were surprised by this unexpected side effect. The top scores continued in more recent tests, though they declined a little in 2009 and still more in 2012.

In fact, a lot of Finnish teachers didn't like the results; they thought PISA was scoring the wrong skills. They still do, but the political benefits of top test scores were unquestionable. Now that Finland is losing economic steam and education funding is drying up, some teachers are happy with today's results. Now, they figure, the government will have to put more money into restoring smaller schools and tackling problems like mould in classrooms (which has been affecting an estimated 250,000 students and teachers).

No doubt B.C. teachers will see just the opposite effect of our good PISA results: Victoria will see no reason to improve education funding, since teachers on a lean diet have been doing so well.

Radically different views

These contrasting attitudes stem from radically different views of the purpose of education. The Finns see themselves as a small country (about the population of B.C.) in a big, tough world where they have to compete as a nation against other nations.

To do so they need every citizen to be as skilled and educated as possible. The current education plan calls for Finland to be "the most competent nation in the world by 2020... to enhance the competitiveness of Finnish knowledge and competence."

So Finnish education is egalitarian and cooperative, and PISA confirms it: gender differences in math and reading achievement are "among the lowest compared to other countries participating in PISA," and relatively few Finnish students are among the low performers.

By contrast, many other countries including Canada are in love with the "star system." We want our kids in the highest-ranking school, with the top-ranking teachers, so they'll go on to become all-As students admitted to the highest-ranking universities with the top-ranking professors -- and then to become the highest-income, most successful members of some high-prestige profession.

In effect, Finland and other social-democratic countries compete (very effectively) against the world. We compete against each other, and so do our kids. For us, education is a war of attrition, a kind of endless Hunger Games, and the survivors are the kids with the most advantages. Everyone else is the collateral damage of the star system, the odds stacked against them from the start.

On his excellent blog Taught by Finland, American teacher Tim Walker reports from Helsinki: Braving The Media Storm of PISA 2012. Click through for the full post and some important links. Excerpt:

There's a storm brewing. In less than 24 hours, the latest PISA results from the 2012 data will be revealed on Tuesday, December 3, 2013 at 10:00 AM (GMT).

Undoubtedly, there will be lots of must-read stories swirling around. Many tales of winners and losers. With certainty, Finland will get its fair share of heat.

On Saturday, Helsingin Sanomat, a well-respected Finnish newspaper, reported that Finland dropped from the Top 10 in math from PISA 2012, noting that Estonia’s 15-year-olds outperformed Finland’s.

Updated: 2:20 PM (GMT), Monday, December 2, 2013

Over the next few days, I will be compiling a list of recent, important articles (concerning the results of PISA 2012) on this page. I'm looking for information that helps us navigate the tricky waters of international test scores, giving us lots of food for thought. Please share other PISA-related articles as I will be regularly adding to this list in the days ahead.

I'll be following PISA 2012 for The Tyee, and will link here to my own report.

These days, people often ask if I'm experiencing culture shock. It's a legitimate question. Just a few months ago, my family and I moved from Boston to Helsinki, Finland. To be honest, the culture shock isn't so dramatic—especially since my wife is a Finn.

But I'm definitely experiencing classroom shock—a shifting of my pedagogical mindset—as I settle into my new job as a 5th grade teacher at a Finnish public school.

My family and I plan on living in Finland permanently, but I can't help but think about what I'd do differently if I returned to an American classroom. Talk about reverse-classroom shock! I've already identified three big shifts I'd make right away.

One key difference: classroom breaks at 45 minutes. I learned this the hard way in my 40 years of college teaching, and once it was routine practice in my courses, life and learning went far more smoothly. However convenient it may be administratively to keep kids' bums in seats for longer times, it's pedagogical poison—and toxic for the teacher as well as the students.